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This case study aims to discuss how the Met Office developed a process for creating ideas that help people look at markets differently and bring people with diverse knowledge together to generate better ideas. The Met Office is the UK’s national weather service and an arm of the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. In its 160 years of history, it has been part of a number of Government Departments, including the Board of Trade, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Defence, where it became an executive agency with a remit to act commercially.

Creating and maintaining income streams in a competitive international market requires ongoing innovation and while its long history and sector pre-eminence means the Met Office has always been successful, it is not always easy to innovate in a public sector organisation with an ingrained culture and traditional top-down authority structure.

This case study discusses how the Met Office developed a process for creating ideas that help people look at markets differently and bring people with diverse knowledge together to generate better ideas.

Inspired by external influence, a small core of innovators began a process of “guerrilla” tactics to drive the process forward, firstly by visiting other businesses including Google and Innocent and learning from the experiences they found there. This included Google’s concept of “Playtime” (allowing people some freedom to play with their pet products) and the use of kitchens to encourage employee interaction. The case study concludes with observations for others to consider in the process of introducing employee-led innovation.

This case study aims to demonstrate how the fortunes of companies and plants can be turned around when management and unions work together to release the knowledge, experience and creativity of the workforce.

Becton Dickinson (BD) has produced medical devices in Drogheda, Ireland, for 50 years, but during the first decade of this century, the plant seemed to be falling off the parent company’s radar. Substantial job losses and a lack of new investment left a space inside the factory “the size of a football field”. Employment had fallen to less than a hundred and corporate interest was waning.

The problem was tackled by the ‘IDEAS Institute’ a trade union initiative developed “to identify ways in which new thinking and new services can be introduced into the workplace for the benefit of employees and the enterprise as a whole”.

The IDEAS Institute held a series of meetings with BD employees, union representatives and management, leading to the creation of the Joint Union-Management Steering Team (JUMST) where both parties were equally represented. Drawing on inclusive dialogue with employees at every level, JUMST defined the future vision for Drogheda and identified the first cluster of improvement projects designed to show that the factory could again become a key performer within the BD group. The case study offers persuasive evidence that workplace partnership means more than good industrial relations. Unions can play a key role in engaging workers at all levels in innovation and improvement, creating win-win outcomes for employees and their employers.

Organisational culture and leadership, employee skills and aptitudes, access to resources, and training are regularly cited as important determinants of the development of innovative work behaviour (IWB). The purpose of the work reported in this paper was to investigate a further set of possible determinants of the development of IWB: those that are information-related.

A mixed methods approach was adopted. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected by questionnaire, interview and focus groups in three large public sector case study organisations in Scotland, Finland and England.

A set of information-related determinants of the development of IWB is evidenced, adding to the list of determinants that are already well documented. Notably workplace information literacy (IL) appears to furnish a bridge between determinants of the development of IWB and workplace learning.

That information-related determinants may be valuable to the development of IWB has not previously merited specific consideration, nor been recognised, in the wider IWB literature. The identification of these determinants in this research should encourage researchers and professionals beyond the domain of information science to pay serious attention to IL. This is particularly important in respect of the role of workplace IL in processes that lead to new knowledge creation and innovation.

Proposing a strengths-based perspective for innovative work behaviour (IWB), the purpose of this paper is to explore character strengths (CS) as antecedents to IWB. Extending the literature and operating in the framework of positive organisational behaviour, this paper considers creative self-efficacy a crucial link between CS and IWB. The role of growth mindset and learning organisation in facilitating IWB, presented as a conceptual model, contributes to the theory in this field, aiding in developing an overarching theory to understand IWB.

A narrative literature review was performed on the CS, IWB and positive organisational behaviour literature to adapt theories and develop propositions for the conceptual model.

This paper develops a conceptual framework proposing direct relationships between CS and IWB. This study posits creative self-efficacy (CSE) as the mediator between this relationship and growth mindset, learning organisation as the moderators for the link between CS and CSE and CSE and IWB.

The paper presents a conceptual framework focusing on the positive personality traits of employees, precisely their CS. This study explores how leveraging these strengths can enhance their capacity for IWB. The suggested model also prompts additional research in understanding IWB.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the conceptual framework proposed is the first to explore the diverse individual differences factors and the role of contextual facilitation in enhancing employees’ IWB. This study contributes to the growing field of positive organisational behaviour and assists HR managers in tapping into employees’ internal resources. This paper’s theoretical and practical discourse can inspire future research and encourage a strengths-based view of workplace processes.

As a sector, higher education is at the low end of innovation rankings. The challenges we face – demographic, technological, political, and pedagogical – will require sustained innovation at a strategic level. Recent research with mature companies has identified exemplars in strategic innovation (e.g., O’Connor, Corbett, & Peters, 2018). This work explores whether – and how – higher education institutions might adapt insights from the corporate sector for strategic innovation in teaching and learning.

The introductory section provides an overview of the nature of strategic innovation (and why it is hard to sustain), strategic issues facing higher education, and the status and challenges of sustaining strategic innovation for teaching. The next two sections describe insights from research with corporate exemplars of sustaining strategic innovation. Each section uses a scenario from higher education as a proof-of-concept test to explore the application of the corporate sector insights for strategic innovation in higher education teaching and learning.

The final section of the chapter discusses the planned next steps to prototype and test adaptation of these corporate sector insights with institutional innovation leaders in higher education, as well as additional potential sources of insights (from other research in the corporate sector and from strategic innovation in the public sector).

This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of how multinational companies can succeed the reconfiguration of their internal structures. The theoretical framework is based on the concept of reconfiguration as a dynamic capability, the Uppsala evolution model and the business network view.

The authors conducted a case study on the reconfiguration of two vertically-related business units within the Solvay group, a world leader in the chemical industry. The empirical study is based on interviews, observations and secondary data.

The paper shows how a multinational enterprise can succeed in reorganizing its internal structures to overcome internal liability of outsidership and to be more competitive and profitable. The reconfiguration enabled Solvay to become a fully integrated leader in the polyamide plastics industry.

The paper explains how the internal reorganization has improved the competitiveness and profitability of the integrated business units.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the effect of organisational culture by its two dimensions (innovative organisational culture and conservative organisational culture) on innovative performance and also investigate the moderating role of the job type on innovative performance in the relationship between innovative organisational culture and conservative organisational culture.

For this study’s purposes, 321 questionnaires from employees of Jordanian private universities were analysed. Convergent validity and discriminant validity tests were performed. Data reliability was confirmed. A bootstrapping technique was used to analyse the data. The multi-group analysis was performed to investigate the moderating role of job type.

The results of this study indicate that the innovative organisational culture will improve innovative performance and that a conservative culture reduces innovation opportunities. Moreover, innovative organisational culture promotes innovative performance for all employees regardless of who holds administrative positions.

This cross-sectional study provides a snapshot at a given moment in time, a methodological limitation that affects the generalisation of its results. Moreover, this study adopted subjective measures and the results are limited to one country, Jordan.

This paper contributes to drawing the attention of senior management to the importance of innovation culture in the performance of innovation at Jordanian private universities surveyed, in particular, and other organisations in general.

The social impact of this study is to respond to the challenge of building an innovation-based culture and to limit the effects of a conservative culture that limits the response to innovation.

This study has important implications for leaders in general. It also highlights the need for organisations to develop an orientation towards innovative organisational culture instead of the classic approach based on the conservative culture of all its members (both administrative and non-administrative employees) and to invest in training that supports this trend, thus increasing their innovative performance, which contributes to raising their capabilities to excel, compete and achieve high levels of performance.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically explore the current understanding of the role of non-R&D and non-managerial employees in different phases and types of innovation, and to propose avenues for future research.

By conducting a mapping study and applying a critical discourse analysis, the phenomenon of “ordinary” employee innovation is explored across various fields, such as human resource management, psychology, economics, strategy, marketing and technology management. Proposals for future research are suggested based on the theoretical framework of dynamic capability, with the aim of further integrating employee innovation in the innovation management domain.

The findings illuminate five main themes that form the employee innovation discourse across various academic disciplines, namely, employee innovative work behavior, firm innovation performance, employee innovation processes, frontline service employees and management tools for employee innovation.

Unlike prior studies in the field of innovation management, this study specifically focuses on the employees without innovation-specific functions in organizations, or “ordinary” employees. Concerning the methodological lens of critical discourse analysis, the authors suggest forming the employee innovation discourse in an inclusive manner. Based on the theoretical lens of dynamic capability, a research agenda is proposed in which employee innovation research makes additional use of innovation processes and types, and takes into account the interactive processes and strong empirical evidence for relevant management tools.